A panorama is a picture that presents a continuous view of the landscape. Typically, such comprehensive pictures are generally created from a series of separate photographs covering the horizon, in slightly overlapping sections.
When an ordinary camera is used for making panoramic pictures, certain precautions must be taken or the adjacent photographs will not dovetail into one another without leaving a visible join. First, the camera must be mounted on a tripod or the like. This is to make sure that all of the photographs are taken from the same viewpoint. If the viewpoint moves between one exposure and the next, the perspective of the two photographs is no longer the same, and it is not possible to find a common boundary for joining them. Second, the camera should be mounted on a rotatable indexing head marked off to show successive evenly-spaced camera positions that will cover the horizon in sections with a suitable overlap between each section.
Typically, the rotatable indexing head only supports the camera in a horizontal orientation for making horizontal-format exposures, i.e. exposures formatted with the horizontal dimension being greater than the vertical dimension. Alternatively, the rotatable indexing head only supports the camera in a vertical orientation for making vertical-format exposures, i.e. exposures formatted with the vertical dimension being greater than the horizontal dimension.